FIRM PRESTIGE RANKING
In marketing, you have the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
In consulting, you’ll find a different set of P’s: Pay, Power, Perks, and Prestige.
Sociologist C. Wright Mills once described prestige as the “shadow of power and money.” It stems from a talent and network, confers name recognition and authority, and ultimately produces greater mobility and opportunities.
In consulting, you’re only as good as your reputation. In this domain, McKinsey & Company remains the dominant force, however fleeting.
While the Prestige ranking accounts for 30% of the Vault Consulting 50 weight in North America, the scores are derived from a far different source. Rather than query consultants about their own firms, Vault asks them to score competing firms with whom they have regular dealings. In other words, the Vault Prestige is more measure of perception than quality. Still, consultants are often the first to hear the word on the street, be it from the peers, clients, and experts in their networks. While prestige may be a lagging indicator, reputation is currency. And that currency is reality.
THE MCKINSEY DIFFERENCE
On a 10-point scale, McKinsey & Company averaged an 8.91 for Prestige – its lowest score in four years. The perennial high performer in Prestige, McKinsey is the oldest and largest consulting firm. Founded in 1926, it encompasses 45,000 employees who are found in 130 countries. As a whole, the McKinsey team speaks 150 languages and operates in nearly every imaginable industry and has partnered with nearly every big name. More than that, the firm boasts 34,000 alumni, such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai, giving them a wealth of connections (and residual business). Between its heritage, network, and scale, you’d be hard-pressed to find a firm with a stronger brand name than McKinsey. And the firm’s approach is centered around gaining buy-in.
“The funny thing about this job is that you’re a coach, a bit of a player, [and] a psychologist,” explains Eric Kutcher, a McKinsey senior partner and North America chair, in a 2024 interview with P&Q. “A lot of what you have to do is build trust. If the clients don’t trust that you are in it for them and not you, they’re probably not going to switch sides and follow us; they’re probably arming themselves for why it shouldn’t be done.”
Clearly, McKinsey has set the bar for convincing clients to take action. To do this, Kutcher says, McKinseyites treat consulting as a “shoulder-to-shoulder sport.” In this model, consultant and client are true partners with the same mission, with McKinsey never forgetting that they are in the room to serve.
“This is about how you make others successful not how we make you feel successful,” Kutcher observes. “I learned this lesson early: it is not about the answer, it is about how you drive an organization to change that makes a difference. The fact that the answer is part of it gives you a North Star to head to. But the real difficult part is how you get an organization to want to get to that North Star. How do you get everyone in that organization to understand why you want to go there and the role that they can play? That’s the most important part of how we communicate. We are helping them articulate the why.”
ALMOST EVERY FIRM SCORES HIGHER IN PRESTIGE
The Boston Consulting Group achieved the second-highest average in Prestige from competing consultants at 8.905 – down from 8.984 the previous year. True to form, Bain & Company posted the third-highest Prestige score at 8.876 – down .075 of a point from 2024.
Strangely, the MBB firms were the ones that lost the most ground in Prestige. Every firm ranked in the Top 25 in Vault’s Prestige Ranking actually produced a higher score than the year before. That includes Deloitte and EY-Parthenon, which rank 4th and 5th respectively for Prestige according to Vault. While both firms sit 1.6 points below their MBB counterparts, their scores inched up by .065 and .033 of a point respectively. At the same time, several major names boosted their prestige over the past year: PwC (+.192), Booz Allen Hamilton (+.090), Accenture (+.168), Ernst & Young (+.123), Kearney (+.050), and KPMG (+.305).
This year’s biggest moves? The Analysis Group shot up by .791 of a point to finish 20th for Prestige. And Cornerstone Research reached 21st courtesy of a .653 of a point jump. In contrast, beyond the MBB, only Forrester (-.054) scored lower in Prestige than the previous year.
Looking back five years to 2020, several patterns emerge. For one, McKinsey’s Prestige has remained nearly unchanged, improving by just .016 of a point compared to BCG (+.147) and Bain (+.276). Several firms experienced score improvements of two points or better during that same time: Analysis Group (+2.524), Cornerstone Research (+2.419), NERA Economic Consulting (+2.310), Alvarez and Marsal (+2.205) and AlixPartners (+2.042). Among firms ranked in Vault’s Top 50 for Prestige in 2025, none had lost ground from their score in 2020.
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